The test paves the way for further tests at Dryden this fall. The spacecraft will carry seven people and land like a plane.

From the Associated Press

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WISE has some asteroid hunting to do.

This week, NASA announced it will reactivate the sleeping space telescope and put it back to work as an asteroid hunter, focused on finding potentially hazardous asteroids and other space rocks that could come uncomfortably close to Earth.

NASA hopes the sleeping infrared telescope still has enough juice in it to discover 150 previously unknown near-Earth objects, and to help scientists learn more about the shape and size of 2,000 others, the agency said in a statement.

It may even help the agency find the perfect asteroid to capture and land a spacecraft on, later this decade.

WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, was launched in December 2009, tasked with scanning the night sky in infrared light. By the time its primary mission ended in February 2011, WISE had captured more than 2.7 million images in multiple wavelengths and cataloged more than 560 million objects in space, according to NASA.

Waking up the telescope will require cooling it down first, said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"The temperatures have warmed up to about 200 degrees above absolute zero, which sounds cool to us on Earth, but is actually quite warm for an infrared telescope," she said.